Especially since the financial crisis that hit the world economy during the first decade of the twenty-firtst century, neoliberalism has been a highly contested term. Left-wing critics have blamed neoliberal policies, particularly those embodied by the so-called Chicago School of Milton Friedman, for growing inequality, the destabilization of the financial system, and the rise of right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic. The conservative government in Poland, a country recognized as a pioneer of transformation after the introduction of Leszek Balcerowicz's shock-therapy reforms in 1989, is now following Hungary's example and moving away from a free-market system and toward a more protectionist economy. Even the International Monetary Fund has expressed doubts about the excessive promotion of neoliberal reform packages as a panacea for economic ills. The most unmistakable sign that the heyday of neoliberalism has passed is, however, the rising interest in the topic among historians.

In an elegantly written study on neoliberal globalist theories developed by the Austrian School of Economics, Quinn Slobodian proves that a historiographical take on neoliberalism as an intellectual movement offers valuable insights not only for economic historians, but also for scholars interested in the broader history of ideas during the twentieth century. Slobodian introduces the reader to what he labels the “Geneva School,” a particular strand of neoliberal thought that originated in post-Habsburg Austria and climaxed in the creation of the World Trade Organization in Geneva seven decades later. Soon after the rise of Austrofascism, Geneva replaced Vienna as the new “spiritual capital” (9) of an international network of economists who defended the principle of the free flow of goods, capital, and labor in a world of tariff walls, paternalistic economic policies, and ideas of national autarky and self-sufficiency.

Pointing to the solutions offered by the pioneers of neoliberal globalism, who trusted more in statecraft and law than in self-regulating markets, the author convincingly argues that Geneva School liberalism essentially outlined a model of political governance, which sought to embed nation-states in a supranational institutional order that secured property rights and protected capital from restrictive national legislation. Based on the writings and personal archives of luminaries such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Gottfried Haberler, as well as of less prominent thinkers such as Wilhelm Röpke, one of the intellectual fathers of the social market economy, the book investigates visions of global economic governance that effectively challenge the commonly held belief that neoliberalism, by definition, is intrinsically opposed to the state. By contrast, Slobodian argues, the significance and function of the state and of state borders in a competitive world market is a recurring element in neoliberal globalist thought. Yet, according to the Austrian liberals, states, laws, and institutions were to be redesigned to guarantee the persistence of an interdependent global economic system, one orchestrated by supranational institutions such as the International Chamber of Commerce, the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.

Examining the genesis of the “militant globalism” (131) promoted by a group of economic liberals who devoted themselves to rethinking the organization of the world economy in a post-imperial context, the book approaches a facet of neoliberal thought that has been rarely discussed, at least in the Anglo-American literature on the history of neoliberalism. Whereas most publications on the topic focus on theories developed in the United States and in Great Britain after World War II, Slobodian claims that a broader geographical and chronological framework is necessary for an analysis of those aspects of the neoliberal canon that relate to the international order. Revisiting von Mises's private seminars on the premises of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in the early 1920s, and the buzzing community of globalist economists in the cosmopolitan beehive of Geneva a decade later, the book aims to identify the formative experiences that yielded the concepts on which neoliberal globalism, as a coherent body of thought, is based. Placing the discussions among economic liberals in the political and social context of their time, Slobodian argues that it was the experience of a collapsing Habsburg empire and the end of the “golden age of [nineteenth-century] world capitalism” (127) that induced them to think in supranational terms.

The expropriation and nationalization of private property in the post-Habsburg successor states, the protection of infant national industries through tariff walls, and the militant socialism of interwar Red Vienna nurtured the conviction that the threat posed by economic nationalism and mass democracy called for global-scale countermeasures. Comparing the policy prescriptions developed by the “Geneva School” in the 1930s and the 1970s, Slobodian draws a line from post-imperial Central Europe to global decolonization. Stressing the rule of law and world orders, the argument goes, neoliberal thinkers aspired to a post-imperial system that resembled the world economic integration of the nineteenth century, which saw the peak of global imperialism. An idealized version of the economic order in the multinational Habsburg Empire was at the root of the globalist economic vision, and it continued to act as a stimulus to neoliberal thinkers into the 1980s. It is above all this original approach to the afterlife of the Habsburg heritage that makes this book a fascinating read. Accentuating the long-term impact of the socialization of the protagonists behind the Mont Pèlerin Society, which formed the nucleus of neoliberalism after 1947, Slobodian puts interwar Europe on the map as the birthplace of economic globalism, which, for much of the postwar era, went against the tide of mainstream economic thought.

Globalists offers an innovative reading of the history of the past century through the prism of neoliberal thought. Slobodian's narrative lists World War I and its aftermath, the Great Depression, and the revolt of the Global South in the 1960s and 1970s as decisive watersheds in the evolution of globalist economic visions—yet, the caesuras of World War II and the Cold War, as overarching themes of global twentieth-century history, are strangely absent from the mindscapes of the book's protagonists. This accessibly written account of neoliberalism as an intellectual current that emerged as an answer to the challenges of a post-imperial world will most certainly attract the interest of readers from outside the narrow field of the history of economic thought. The story of the globalist Austrian cosmopolitans and their edifice of ideas offers much food for thought, especially as tariff walls, self-encapsulation, and protectionism are on the rise again in the current worldwide tug-of-war between economic nationalists and globalists.